In recent weeks, Dick Cheney and other Republicans have been working overtime to defend the Bush administration's use of torture.

Earlier this week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) defended the use of torture as a technique that works.

...I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.

George Carlin once said:

People get all upset about torture, but when you get right down to it, it’s really a pretty good way of finding out something a person doesn’t want you to know.

The thing is...Carlin was joking. These guys aren't. Carlin was a comedian. These guys make decisions which impact your lives and the lives of others in other countries.

And they think torture works. But it doesn't.

The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

While former Vice President Dick Cheney claims that CIA memos will show "the success of the effort". This week, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) referred to those CIA memos and found a very different reading:

Nothing I have seen — including the two documents to which former Vice President Cheney has repeatedly referred — indicates that the torture techniques authorized by the last administration were necessary, or that they were the best way to get information out of detainees. The former vice president is misleading the American people when he says otherwise.

Former Minnesota governor Jesse Venture was a Navy Seal. In his training he had to undergo waterboarding. On Larry King Live he discussed his experience.

That’s right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence — every one of us was water boarded. It is torture....

...That's why torture's no good in a court of law. Because if you're torturing someone they are gonna tell you what they think you want to hear to stop the torture. Let me say this - they say it's prevented things by us torturing - if that's the case then why haven't we caught Bin Laden? Because we got his people and if we tortured them they ought to be able to tell us where he's at. See it don't work. We haven't captured Bin Laden. We haven't done anything. Torture does not work.

If torturing people had led to anything of note, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The Conservatives would be able to point to some concrete things...but they can't. Because torturing people didn't do anything except make some chickenhawks feel more like Rambo.

But it didn't protect us. It didn't lead to a flood of good intelligence. It just made America look immoral.